When I eat too fast, I eat too much. I knew that, but until now I haven’t been able to help it.

Now Juan Ramirez has come to my help. In March I wrote here about “Eating Too Fast” and some of the strategies I use. After that article, Juan wrote me about his invention to help us slow down at the table.

When we eat slowly, we can avoid overeating and therefore can control our diabetes better. But some of us eat fast because we like our meals to be hot rather than lukewarm. I know that’s my excuse.

Now, however, the great food cool off is no longer inevitable. I know this because I bought one of the “HotSmart Gourmet Plates” that Juan Ramirez invented and wrote me about.

“I am pre-diabetic myself and I am convinced that eating slowly works to avoid overeating, preventing obesity and type 2 diabetes,” Juan emailed me. “My heat-retentive plates keep food warm, need only one minute preheating, and stay hot for more than 30 minutes. The rim stays always cool for safe easy handling with your bare hands.”

This message grabbed my attention. I had to have one, but when Juan wrote me, he had one little problem. He was sold out of them at that time.

Recently he wrote to tell me that he was caught up with demand, and Amazon.com now has them in stock. “All you have to do is type HotSmart in the main page for all departments.” Or you can go to Amazon’s direct link for HotSmart Gourmet Plates.

Two of Juan’s websites explain the HotSmart plate in more detail. They are HotSmart Gourmet Plates and Lose Weight By Eating Slowly.

As soon as I got Juan’s message that Amazon had his plates back in stock I ordered one. Amazon sells them for $18.85 each.

Since then I have made a point of using my HotSmart plate for every hot meal that I eat now. It really works for keeping my food hot and keeping me from gobbling it down.

My guess is that like me you may have the secret little vice of eating too fast. If you do, eating off a HotSmart plate can help. While it won’t force you to slow down, it will take away any excuse you made to yourself to bolt your food down the hatch.

“What’s all this buzz about kimchi?” a friend asked me the other day. “People are talking about the health benefits of this Korean dish.”

Yes, the recent buzz about kimchi is strange, because Koreans have been eating this fermented vegetable relish for at least three thousand years. It’s not that kimchi is a revolutionary new food straight out of a high-tech laboratory.

In fact, our rediscovered appetite for kimchi is a part of the conservative food movement that careful and thoughtful people have begun to follow. Kimchi is one of the most important fermented foods.

“Fermentation, like cooking with fire, is one of the initial conditions of civilization,” writes Burkhard Bilger in the current issue of The New Yorker. “The alcohol and acids it produces can preserve fruits and grains for months and even years, making sedentary society possible.”
We can date the beginning of the new buzz about kimchi to at least 2003 with the publication of Sandor Katz’s underground best-seller, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. Then, in 2005, Korean scientists claimed that 11 of 13 infected chickens started to recover from avian flu after being fed an extract of kimchi.My personal rediscovery of kimchi was an automatic result of my visit to South Korea last month. With a single exception, the restaurants that I ate in served me kimchi with every meal.

One of the Kimchi dishes on this table is the really red one

The typical Korean kimchi starts with fermented napa cabbage to which they can add all sorts of vegetables, often including radishes, celery, carrots, onions, garlic, and salt — and especially red chili. Some kimchi can in fact be too hot for most American taste buds, although I relished every type I tried while I was visiting Korea.

During my visit to South Korea the country was experiencing what everyone called the Kimchi crisis and some even said was a national tragedy. “The price for one head of long-leafed Napa cabbage grown in South Korea has skyrocketed in the past month, from about $2.50 to as much as $14,” according to a front-page article in The International Herald Tribune. “Domestic radishes have tripled in price, to more that $5 apiece, and the price of garlic has more than doubled.”

Most of the blame goes to Korea’s overly rainy weather this year. The crisis is so bad that President Lee Myung-bak said that until the cost comes down he will take the drastic step of eating only the cheap and “inferior” kind of cabbage — the round-headed variety that we have in America.

President Lee may actually doing his body a favor by eating kimchi made with our typical cabbage. The most widely available source of kimchi that we have in the U.S. comes from Rejuvenative Foods. Whole Foods Markets carry their kimchi jars in refrigerated cases. A spokesperson for the manufacturer says that they use regular green cabbage in their products because it has the most lactobacillus on its leaves since it grows closer to the ground than napa cabbage. Red cabbage won’t work. Only in its “Caraway Kimchi” does Rejuvenative Foods use napa cabbage and in that case only about one-third of the cabbage.

Lactobacillus is the key to kimchi. We use lactobacillus species to make most of the other fermented pro-biotic foods, including yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, pickles, beer, wine, cider, and chocolate. These lactic acid bacteria may possess potential therapeutic properties including anti-inflammatory — especially important for people with diabetes — as well as possible anti-cancer activities.

But, except for kimchi and sauerkraut, people with diabetes have good reason to avoid or minimize all of these pro-biotic foods. They don’t fit within “the Paleo Diet,” which my friend and associate Joan Mercantini just wrote about in an important article here.

Unlike those other fermented foods, I can think of only two reasons why you might want to stop short of a kimchi feast. One is spice and the other is salt.

Some, but not all kimchi preparations are indeed too hot for most Americans. So shop around. And until I discovered the varieties of kimchi that Rejuvenative Foods offers, I thought that the high levels of salt they have would be an insurmountable obstacle.

Not. Rejuvenative offers three varieties of kimchi that are quite low in salt. These include my personal favorite, Sea Vegetable Kimchi. Caraway Kimchi and Salt-Free Garden Kimchi are even lower in salt, but sadly I haven’t been able to find them where I live. I hope that you are luckier in your home town.

Of course, if none of these great foods work for you then you can fall back to the bland sauerkraut. Just make sure that any kimchi or sauerkraut you eat has live cultures.

Give kimchi a chance. It is not only one of the most healthy foods we can eat but is also both tasty and tangy. It has earned its buzz.

I reflected at that time on the aphorism by the German philosoper Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1888 he wrote what we usually translate as, “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.”

My own anecdotal evidence has led me to accept this as wisdom. I know that I need to challenge myself, both physically and mentally. I have to push my limits. I have to keep pushing the envelope.

When I don’t keep trying harder, my mental and physical muscles atrophy. And my life gets boring.

Now, we have gone beyond the age of aphorisms and anectodal evidence. Now, a psychology professor at the University of Bullafo and three colleagues have studied
people who reported their lifetime history of adverse experiences and several measures of current mental health and well being. Their analysis of this study of a national survey panel of 2,398 subjects assessed repeatedly from 2001 to 2004 found those exposed to some adverse events reported better mental health and well-being outcomes than people with a high history of adversity or those with no history of adversity.

“Our findings revealed,” says lead author Mark Seery, PhD, “that a history of some lifetime adversity — relative to both no adversity or high adversity — predicted lower global distress, lower functional impairment, lower PTS symptoms, and higher life satisfaction.” They also found that people with a history of some lifetime adversity appeared less negatively affected by recent adverse events than other individuals. Although these data cannot establish causation, Dr. Seery says the evidence is consistent with the proposition that in moderation, experiencing lifetime adversity can contribute to the development of resilience. You can find the abstract of their study online.

What does this have to do with diabetes? A lot. No question that have diabetes is more than a bit of adversity. But anyone to is controlling his or her diabetes will tell you that having it will make us healthier and happier. And stronger too.

In some important respects this Asian country is more like America than most of us would think. This country is a democracy with a booming economy.  

But the differences are great and go beyond Korea’s use of a different language and even a different alphabet than Westerners use. The differences go far beyond  history and tradition. The biggest differences that I have seen during my visit this month are in the people themselves.  

I saw with my own eyes how thin almost all Koreans are. Coming from the United States — even though I live in the thinnest state — I have been amazed to see almost no obesity here.  

So, of course, I expected that almost no one in Korea would have diabetes. After all, didn’t the American weight problem lead to the rapid rise of diabetes in our country?  

We know that some sort of link between being overweight and having diabetes exists. We do know that being overweight doesn’t cause diabetes, because two-thirds of American are overweight and about one-tenth of us have diabetes. But as our weight has gone up so too has the proportion of people with diabetes. Those two conditions have to have some association.  

The Korean paradox is that this quite thin country has about the same incidence of diabetes as we do. Something else has to be at work here.  

What is at work may well be work itself.  

The Koreans have wrought an economic miracle. I don’t know of any other country that has developed so rapidly. Just four decades ago, gross domestic product per capita was comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia. My Korean friends say that Korea was poorer than Ethiopia then.  

When the Korean War ended in 1953 — less than 60 years ago — this country was completely destroyed. Now, people talk about the “Miracle on the Han River,” which refers to Korea’s transformation from the ashes of the Korean War to becoming the 13th largest economy in the world, according to an article that I read in this morning’s Korea Herald. It now surpasses Mexico, which has more than twice as many people.  

The miracle owes a lot to this country’s indomitable quest for education and willingness of its people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That quest in turn owns much to the Confucian work ethic.  

These people really do work hard. And long.  

My friend Alex Leesong, the general counsel of i-SENS, a leading international manufacturer of blood glucose meters and test strips, told me that the Korean work week was the longest in the world. I was impressed, but had to check it out. In fact, what he told me was an understatement, according to what I read on Wikipedia.  

“By far, workers in South Korea have the longest work hours among OECD countries,” the international organization of the 33 developed economies. ”The average South Korean works 2,390 hours each year. This is over 400 hours longer than the next longest-working country and 34 percent more hours than the average in the United States.”  

At that time Dr. Kim and I hadn’t met. I interviewed him on the phone from my home office in Colorado.

We had to travel all the way to South Korea to meet in person. We are in Busan, Korea’s second largest city with about 3.6 million residents. Specifically, we are both attending the International Diabetes Federation’s Western Pacific Region Congress along with about 3,000 other people who work with diabetes. This congress is taking place in Busan Exhibition and Convention Center (BEXCO) in the most modern part of the city near Haeundae, the most famous and frequented beach in all of South Korea.

As modern as Korea is — particularly in this part of the country — it is naturally quite different from what I normally experience in Colorado. But for Dr. Kim, Busan is quite familiar. He grew up in Busan and has a condo here.

Until I mentioned the meeting during the course of the interview for the article I wrote here in August, Dr. Kim didn’t know that it was happening in his hometown this year. He then arranged to attend the meeting. And at the last minute the conference organizers approved his poster presentation for the tiniBoy lancets.

While his poster was among the several hundred presented in the huge conference hall, it was the one that interested me the most. I made a point to visit his poster presentation.

His poster, “A Pain-Free Lancet with a Small Needle for Blood Glucose Monitoring,” concluded that the “average pain level from the new lancet is significantly lower than that from old style lancets.” I had reached the same conclusion after Dr. Kim sent me a box of 100 of his lancets. I shared them with the members of my diabetes support group, and they all agreed.

Amazon.com sells a box of 100 tiniBoy lancets for $12.95. These lancets are extremely tiny — 36 gauge. They fit in all lancing devices except the Softclix and Multiclix.

In person, Dr. Kim is a gentle doctor who has the caring bedside manner that so many physicians seem to have lost. I’m sure that this is important in his specialties, which include what I have always though would be the most difficult one for a doctor to practice, dealing with victims of cancer. In Dr. Kim’s practice of hematology, oncology, and internal medicine he has to console many families who have lost their loved ones to cancer.

At the same time, Dr. Kim is a member of the board of trustees of the Upland, California, hospital, in the same city where I lived from the ages of one to eight and the very hospital where my sister was born. He is also chief of medicine at the hospital.

As busy as he already is, Dr. Kim has a dream of creating a charity hospital for homeless people in Southern California. He has such drive and dedication that I am sure that he will succeed in implementing his dream.

About three years ago Dr. Kim discovered that he himself has type 2 diabetes. Like all of us, he didn’t like the pain that we have to go through when testing our blood glucose. But he also works with babies and couldn’t accept their cries when we subjected them to the pain of the large old-style lancets.